Dispatches from DrupalCon Day One

DrupalCon is alive and thriving. I have yet to hear any attendance numbers but this conference is huge!

The day kicked off with the opening keynote from Drupal founder Dries Buytaert reviewing the state of Drupal and where things are heading.

Some of the best points came when discussing Drupal 8 and how things are changing. Improving the experience for site visitors, authors and developers is a key focus for the next release. Drupal wins on tech, but loses on the authoring experience, this is changing. Under the hood are some great new advances for developers; Drupal 8 will be adopting a large part of the Symfony web/php framework and RESTfulservices are coming.

A key session we attended centered on building Drupal apps for distributions. The session went into details about how the Drupal Apps module works and explained the Open App Standard. Apps solve a problem that modules canot. Modules are hard to find, hard to install, hard to configure and lastly hard to use sometimes. Apps simplify this process. you can learn more about apps and the Open App Standard here.

I wrapped up my conference day with 2 great sessions, “I just want to edit a node” and “Designing Fast and Beautiful Maps”. The first targeted UI and content and editors focused on the node editing experience, how it has improved, but where it still fails and how this can get better in Drupal 8. The second session was a hands on demo of making web maps using MapBox. The process, while highly technical makes the process seem effortless thanks to the TileMill app.